SOURCE: Bateman, Claire. “Recent Poetry in the Carolinas.” South Carolina Review 25 (fall 1992): 154-57.

In the following excerpt, Bateman explores Chappell's poetic development from The World between the Eyes to Midquest, offering a positive assessment of both collections.

The World between the Eyes, Fred Chappell's first book (1971), dwells on “agonies of weather and enclosure” in a world that is “surcharged” (a word that appears frequently) with light, with the future, with sensation. And yet the child, a central consciousness, watches with “eyes that starve.” Surfeit and deprivation work in counterpoint through Chappell's song of “brutalities / of presence, brutality of abundance.” “Too bad, when things don't stay the same, / And worse still when they do,” comments the speaker in “Heath, Two Years Old.” There is a strong element of fatedness in this book, as characters act out their ritual roles in family and community, and the knowledge of what is...